Kyle Broflovski has grown up
by Saboteuse
Summary: [CH 3 UP] This has got to be the lamest title ever, I know. Anyway, this is my homage fic to Kyle Broflovski. He's grown up now. The chapter breaks make no sense :D
1. Chapter One

Dr. Kyle Broflovski, PhD, waited at a table in his favorite restaurant. His frizzy red hair was cropped short, and his large brown eyes looked like they should have been behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. They weren't, though. He shivered and pulled his sage-grey coat around him. It was so chilly today.

Brooklyn was his favorite borough, but the greatest diner he'd ever been to was a little hole-in- the-wall in Manhattan. Actually, it was a bit like that café, Monk's Café, from Seinfeld. Kyle hadn't started watching that show until he was twelve, though. When he was eight, precocious as he was, he was still rutted in the mire of jokes about flatulence.

_We got up to some crazy things,_ Kyle thought. Those kids he had hung out with back in that little mountain town, South Park...he was still in touch with Stanley Marsh, his old buddy, but not Cartman. At age 17, Cartman had declared, "I'm getting out of this hicktown!" and bought a one-way plane ticket to L.A. Reportedly, he had made it there all right, but was not in the film industry. Rather, he had made it big with the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation.

And Kenny...poor Kenny. Kyle still hadn't recovered from the trauma of losing Ken McCormick, who supplied the best dirty one-liners in town from behind his muffling orange parka's hood. No one had known just

how Kenny had died...they had found his head (still inside the hood) 100 yards away from his left foot. The town coroner had been stumped. "I'll be damned," the man had said, scratching his head. "The McCormick kid is blond. Get in here, Dave, I owe you fifty bucks."

It had been doubly sad, Kyle mused, considering Kenny's previous, miraculous recovery from a degenerative muscular disease...

Kyle broke out of his reverie as the waitress came to take his order. "I'll have a cup of coffee and a tuna sandwich," he said in a slightly affected Brooklyn accent. God, how hard he wanted to blend into this culture. He felt like he'd belonged here all his life.

The waitress nodded, scribbling his order in chickenscratch upon a tablet of recycled paper. She departed, leaving Kyle to his thoughts once more.

Kyle was rather glad he had thought of Stan; he thought maybe he'd send him a Chanukah card. When they went to college, they had exchanged humorous greeting cards for a while, some utterly pointless. Kyle had once opened a pitch-black envelope to find a card inside which began, in a gentle curly font, "My sincere condolences..."

Now, to everyone's relief, Stan was a mail carrier who resided in Wisconsin. It seemed as though the loser who had showed up so many years ago, claiming to be Stan's future self, was just an elaborate hoax, a normal guy with dark brown hair and a red and blue winter hat.

Not a bad profession for the guy, Kyle had thought when he had learned of Stan's career path. Civil service suits him. And, as Stan had said, "I want to serve my country, but I don't want to get killed."

Kyle pulled out his palm pilot and jotted efficiently here and there with the stylus, writing in Graffiti, "send card to stan."

It was at this point that the coffee should have arrived, but it everyone knows that it takes longer than that to percolate a cup of coffee. So Kyle passed the time by thinking about Franz Kafka's novel _The Trial_. Kyle's dissertation had been on Franz Kafka, after all. He worked part-time at a bookstore and a coffeehouse. Kyle would never have guessed he had a mind for literary analysis, but there you were. In fact, Kyle's mother had been shocked when he had announced his career path.

"Why can't you be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a scientist, or something?" she had demanded shrilly. "You've always been at the head of your class; you're too smart to be wasting your life working in some bookstore!" Gerald had not been as vehement as his wife, but still apprehensive about how good of a decision Kyle was making. However, once Kyle had explained that the thing he truly most wanted to be in his life was a literary scholar, they understood and supported him.

The coffee arrived. Kyle found himself admiring the waitress' curly red hair. There weren't enough redheads, he concluded. Then he rebuked himself for thinking of another woman. He was very scrupulous in that way. There was no one for him but Laura.

They rented an apartment together in Brooklyn. She was a medical resident who liked to paint pictures of the intricacies of the viscera in her spare time. She had laughed so hard when he told her he was from a mountain town in Colorado. That was long ago, when they had met at a book signing.

"South Park, Colorado?" she had said blankly. "Never heard of it."

"Yeah, neither have I," Kyle quipped. He removed a crumpled photo from his wallet as proof that South Park existed. The picture was quite old; there were white cracks on its surface, where it had been bent. In the foreground was a sign made of wooden planks, which read "South Park" in ornate lettering; in the background was a scenic backdrop of snow-clad pines and, beyond, the sweep of Rockies.

Laura had peered at the third-grader in the green flap-hat, orange jacket and lime-green mittens. "It's hard to tell with that hat on, but is that you?" Kyle nodded wordlessly, slightly embarrassed. He took the initiative and began introducing the others.

"This is Stan," he said, pointing to the kid in the brown jacket. "He was my best friend back in South Park." His finger slid to the very fat child dressed in aqua, yellow and red. "Cartman. Eric Cartman. Most obnoxious bastard in the world...but, I miss him somehow."

"Where is he now?" Laura had asked, concerned.

Kyle shook his head. "Dunno...picking up garbage somewhere in L.A." Seeing the look on Laura's face, he added hurriedly, "His mom was a hermaphrodite, he had gender issues, and he made fun of me a lot. He did horrible things, many and varied…some very difficult to stomach. Don't worry about him."

Laura's green eyes had moved on to the boy in the orange parka who was somehow perched on top of the sign. He was waving happily like the others. "Who's that?" she asked, with a laugh in her voice. Kyle swallowed. Nervously, he shut one eye and massaged it with his finger.

"That's Kenny. He's dead," he said shortly.


	2. Chapter Two

Some things were just a little bit difficult to explain to Laura. South Park wasn't normal. It was a strange amalgam of the mundane and the outrageous. Anything could happen in a town with an elementary school that had a cow for a mascot.

After meeting at the book signing, Kyle and Laura had arranged to meet at the coffeehouse where Kyle worked. Over a café au lait (Kyle) and a cappuccino (Laura) they had tried to make small talk. Kyle was surprised at himself; he wasn't as shy as he normally was when talking to a love interest. When he was in grad school, at Stoney Brook State University of New York, he had always found himself a bit awkward when it came to getting to know someone. Laura was different, however. It wasn't just the way her dark green eyes warmed up when she talked, or she kept her hands still and laced on her knee. There was something else in her demeanor that he was attracted to, on a profound level that instilled in him a certainty, an affirmation, of love.

Laura had told him of her life; her upbringing in New Jersey, how she had gone through a rocky time in high school and at last found her niche in New York. Kyle related to her of his time in South Park, describing how he had been surrounded by three close friends, only two of them very decent. He had said, growing a bit hot in the face, how he had been a top student and always had to contend with other peoples' imbecility. (Including his own, at times.)

He had felt compelled to disclose certain stories of his childhood to her, but had felt a hitch when it came to a certain few…what would she think, for instance, about his participation in a pre-pubescent, primal-instinct-fueled battle for the attention of Bebe Stevens, the pretty blonde who had developed breasts early? He had finally told her, amid much trepidation; she stopped laughing eventually. And even though she was a doctor, and not one faint of heart at that, it had taken her a little while to get over the story of Cartman's chili con carne. ("Dear _God!_" she had yelled. "Oh my _God_! I'm glad he went to Los Angeles and not New York! Oh God!")

They were not married yet, or even engaged, but Kyle was sure that they would be someday. He even planned the wedding in his mind. It would have to be a Reform wedding, not a Conservative Jewish wedding like he had hoped, since only Laura's father, and not her mother, was Jewish, rendering her technically non-Jewish. He imagined what their children's names would be: Zachary or Chaim for a boy, Rebecca or Hannah for a girl.

At present Laura was at the hospital where she worked, doing a short shift in the trauma ward. Kyle looked into his coffee and shuddered. Laura really has guts, he thought. She's got to have guts to work with...guts. He never really felt at ease with the painting of the mitral valve of the heart hanging on the wall at home. Or the kidney one. Or the picture of the pancreas waltzing with the spleen.

"Laur'? I'm going to go out for a bit, ok?" he had said on one particular occasion, when she had lugged home a swollen, excised appendix in a jar of formaldehyde to paint. He tore his eyes away from the revolting thing and tried not to vomit as he ran out of the apartment.

Because she loved him, Laura had ceased to bring her work home. Kyle no longer had to worry about coming face-to-face with a disembodied organ anymore, and Laura no longer had to worry about her boyfriend having a nervous breakdown.


	3. Chapter Three

Kyle took another sip of coffee. His stomach growled. He knew the sandwich would be arriving soon, and didn't feel like eating without reading. He picked up the black messenger bag sitting on the chair next to him. He rummaged through the assortment of books, cough drops, kleenex and various other sundry items.

"Popular Science..." he muttered. "No, just read it..." Although literature was Kyle's passion now, he still maintained an avid interest in a little of everything, in the spirit of the intelligent and witty kid he had once been. "The New Yorker...nah, I'll save it for later. Promotional Flyers That I Take From Random People..." he pulled out a handful of colorful brochures. A lavender flyer printed on recycled paper caught his eye. "Earth's Aura Vibrational Medicine Boutique. Selling crystals, herbs, talismans and books." Kyle grimaced. "Oh no, bad memories, baaad memories..."

The bad memories stemmed from the experience that was also, at least partially, the reason Kyle couldn't stand to look at Laura's kidney painting. Kyle wasn't afraid of needles or blood...you couldn't afford that when you were a Type 1 diabetic. But bad associations connected with particular organs were different...

The kidney incident had happened when he was just eight. He would never forget his brush with death; how could he? The terrifying sense of his own end looming above him, growing closer...and closer...he remembered everything quite clearly, more clearly than he would have liked...

Stan's arms had shuddered with the weight of carrying Kyle's prone form as he stood in the godforsaken confines of Cartman's basement. Kyle slipped in and out of attentiveness as his mind meandered deliriously through little eddies of thought, but he tried to focus on the blurred, obese shape of Cartman. He heard Stan put forth his case, and felt his heart contract within his breast and send a chill through him as the answer came....

No. Cartman, the only match for Kyle, would not give him one of his kidneys. To make things, worse, the refusal was sung to the tune of a song from a popular musical.

He shuddered and felt as though he were going to vomit. To regurgitate life and be empty...forever...

Stan, his best friend, blazed with grief-stoked fury. "Cartman, you are so going to hell when you die!"

Cartman had baited them, taunted them, Stan and Kyle both. Held out of Kyle's reach not some trivial thing that someone with no fear of death would care about...but Kyle's own life.

When Cartman had said, "Maybe I will give it to you-- for a price," Kyle had known it was just one of Cartman's cruel ploys, but he had queried further anyway, not daring to hope. "How much?"

"Well, how much do you think your life is worth, Kyle?"

After learning that Cartman was using the desperate situation as just another one of his moneymaking schemes (apparently Kyle's life was worth exactly $10,000,000.00), Stan had staggered out with Kyle in his arms. Kyle didn't have the energy to say anything during Stan's crying spells. He didn't blame him, really...if his best friend was dying, he would be crying, too.

Then Cartman had been tricked into donating his kidney, and Kyle had lived, although not without a faint shudder when he thought of where it had come from...

Almost as bad as Cartman's coldheartedness was Kyle's mother's handling of the situation. Visits with a fraudulent New Age "healer" called Miss Information(it seemed so obvious to Kyle now that she was merely Misinformation in disguise) had duly led to his mother's infatuation with so-called holistic medicine and diets of lemon juice and cayenne pepper—which only aggravated his nausea. Miss Information's near-fatal therapy was off-putting enough to keep him away from chakras and tinctures for a lifetime. The only thing that had saved him from total annihilation was Stan, who never ceased his caustic attacks on Miss Information…he didn't give up until Kyle was in the hospital being prepped for a kidney transplant.

He crumpled the lavender flyer in his fist.

"I'll read the New Yorker," he muttered. Talking to himself was something that made him feel better, and he had a compelling need to get a grip at the moment.

He riffled past the ads to the table of contents. The short story piece looked promising...he ambled through the thin, not-too-glossy pages, eyeing the cartoons. He was just getting carried away by the story when the same redheaded waitress came with his tuna sandwich.

"Thanks," he said quickly, and carefully lifted away half of the sandwich. Damn, they were good. With the other hand, he munched on the large slice of pickle that came on the side. The tuna fish-to-mayo ratio was perfect.

Something red bobbed into his field of vision. He reached up with a small, compact hand and tugged on a fiery, springlike lock of hair. Time for a haircut.

He went back to his magazine and soon finished the sandwich.


End file.
